Abortion
Illustrations • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
0 ratings
· 5 viewsNotes
Transcript
Sermon Tone Analysis
A
D
F
J
S
Emotion
A
C
T
Language
O
C
E
A
E
Social
BreakPoint with Charles Colson
Commentary #020122 - 01/22/2002
Never Again: Abortion and a World that Never Was
"Never again!" abortion advocates intone. "Never
again will women be forced to go to back-alley
butchers and have abortions performed with coat
hangers. Keep abortion legal and safe."
But that argument has one major flaw. "Never again"
never was! Most of the scenario of what allegedly
happened before the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade
decision is fiction!
Pro-choice rhetoric claims that before Roe nearly a
million women obtained illegal abortions each year,
"performed with rusty coat hangers in back alleys" --
resulting in five to ten thousand deaths.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau of Vital Statistics
reports that only thirty-nine women died from illegal
abortions in the year before Roe v. Wade. You need to
go back to 1942 to find one thousand deaths, but
remember, that's before antibiotics were available.
Government data reveals that the reduction in deaths
from abortion didn't result from making the procedure
legal, but from antibiotics.
Then where do the abortion activists get "five to ten
thousand deaths a year"? One source answers, "The
claims . . . are based on inaccurately calculated
extrapolations from flawed and erroneous data of the
1920s and 1930s." That is, they took inaccurate death
rates before penicillin and multiplied them by the
population growth after penicillin. It never added
up.
And as co-founder of the National Abortion Rights
Action League, Dr. Bernard Nathanson now
acknowledges, math wasn't the primary reason for the
inflated numbers. Nathanson, now a leader in the pro-
life movement, says, "I confess that I knew the
figures were totally false . . . But in the
'morality' of the revolution, it was a useful figure,
widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct
it with honest statistics? The overwhelming concern
was to get the laws eliminated, and anything . . .
which had to be done was permissible."
What about the claim that nearly a million illegal
abortions were performed annually? Dr. Frank
Beckwith, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Culture
and Law at Trinity Graduate School answers, "There is
no reliable statistical support for this claim." One
sophisticated study estimated that the number of
abortions before legalization averaged about one
hundred thousand per year. That's a far cry from
"nearly a million."
And how many of those were performed by "back-alley
butchers, with rusty coat hangers"? As far back as
1960, Dr. Mary Calderone of Planned Parenthood
acknowledged that eighty-four to eighty-seven percent
of all illegal abortions were performed by licensed
physicians. Dr. Beckwith comments, "It seems that the
vast majority of the alleged 'back-alley butchers'
eventually became the 'reproductive health providers'
of our present day."
As the website "roevwade.org" aptly says, "'Never
again' never was." And as Dr. Beckwith contends, " .
. . it would go beyond the duty of kindness to call
such claims an exaggeration . . . the pro-choice
movement was simply lying."
"Pro-choice" ideologues, and the moneyed interests
behind the abortion industry, continue to circulate
unsubstantiated claims. It's time to point out "Never
again" never was -- and it's time to rethink our
national position in the light of real facts.
ABORTION
ABORTION
"Though abortion -- including the killing of viable infants at the
verge of birth -- is now a sacrament of the Democratic Party, nobody
admits to being 'pro-abortion'; they are 'pro-choice.' This is an
obvious lie. The right to choose anything presupposes the right to
live. The child, fetus, embryo, or whatever you want to call the
entity growing within its mother's womb has no 'choice' about being
killed. It will never have a choice about anything. The pro-abortion
side is pro-abortion in the same way that advocates of slavery were
pro-slavery. 'Oh,' they protest, 'but we don't insist that everyone
get an abortion; we only want people' -- that is, mothers -- 'to have
a choice!' Then nobody was pro-slavery either, since nobody insisted
that every white man own a slave; they were 'pro-choice.' They wanted
each white man to be 'free' to decide whether to buy slaves; or they
wanted every state to decide whether to permit slavery. Of course they
overlooked the obvious fact that the slaves themselves had no choice;
in their minds this was irrelevant." --Joseph Sobran